February 22, 2021
Today Spotify announced product updates aiming to further differentiate in the saturated music streaming and growing podcast market.
1) International: 36 new languages and 85 markets (now total nearly 180)
2) Ad marketplace: Audience Network allowing to reach listeners on originals/exclusives, podcasts via Megaphone and Anchor. Podcast also coming to self-serve Ad Studio
3) HiFi: high-quality audio subscription competing with Tidal and Amazon Music HD
4) Paid podcast subscriptions: test to allow creators to publish paid podcasts via Anchor
5) WordPress partnership: to turn written audio content into podcasts via its podcast platform Anchor
6) Video: coming to more podcasts. Major miss for YouTube to alternate between background audio and video.
7) Interactive tools: with the ability for listeners to be part of the show incl Q&A, polls etc. Likely more to come in that area with the rise of Clubhouse.
8) Discovery Mode: self-serve tool for artists to run audience development campaigns.
9) Podcast discovery: better tools and recommendations
10) Lots of originals
Overall:
- 345M monthly users (+27% y/y)
- 155M subscribers (+24% y/y)
- 25% listen to podcasts
- 2.2m podcasts (3x from 2019)